Saxum Samson: The Monolith at the End of Milton

Lecture by Shaun Nowicki, Ph.D. Candidate in English, University of California, Santa Barbara. Recipient of the 2025-26 Kenneth Karmiole Graduate Research Fellowship

What does it mean to feel stony? John Milton’s 1671 verse drama Samson Agonistes retells the last day of the biblical Judge Samson, as he moves from an initial feeling that his disabled body is a “Sepulcher, a moving grave” to his eventual toppling of the Temple of Dagon occasioned by a mysterious set of “rousing motions.” This talk examines Milton’s deployment of the lithic as a structuring metaphor for understanding both Samson’s initial abjection and the eventual return of his strength. In doing so, the play both draws on emergent cultural understandings of disability as an abject category of being and offers a refutation of that paradigm by considering the potential vivacity of non-living things and the possibilities inherent in the alliances between the human and nonhuman world. Stone marks the boundary of non-feeling life and allows Milton to ask if Samson’s disability bars him from the sensual world and how he will need to reconceptualize his perceptive horizons. Milton’s conception of stone as a dead, senseless material draws on both Aristotelean models of animation and new scientific paradigms that were reshaping the taxonomy of matter and life. Within these discourses and their many unresolved tensions, we find pathways for considering ways to “feel stony” and avenues for Samson’s eventual transformation. The first part of this talk will examine Milton’s inheritances that inform the trajectory of his version of Samson, including biblical exegetical practice and early modern poetry which positions Samson as “sottish” and unfeeling well before the loss of his prophetic strength. Milton breaks with these earlier authors by framing Samson’s lack of feeling as originating with his blinding, and, in doing so, refocuses Samson’s travail around his relationship with his own body. In addition, Nowicki will touch on how new understandings of stone push our sense of what stone is and can do, including unresolved questions of stone’s animation in the period. The second part of the talk will examine Samson’s journey from unfeeling to feeling, and interrogate the ambiguities, nuances, and tensions in Milton’s portrayal of disability and political action.

Shaun Nowicki is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of California, Santa Barbara focusing on the intersections between environment and embodiment in early modern English literature. His dissertation examines how early modern writers deploy abjected forms of matter, like dust, dirt, and stone, as metaphors for emergent conceptions of disability, sexuality, gender, and race. He has published reviews in Disability Studies Quarterly and English Studies, and he is a co-author of an essay on care in/for UCSB’s Ballitore Collection in a forthcoming volume from Bucknell University Press.

The lecture will take place via Zoom. To register to attend, please fill out the form here 

Image Description: Detail from The. Holie. Bible.: conteynyng the olde Testament and the newe (Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 2099 copy 2) depicting Samson toppling the Temple of Dagon.  https://digitalcollections.folger.edu/img115107